he’s seeing as he looks at his one true self.
And then he turns, and flicks the passport over the side of the boat.
Instinctively, I lurch to catch it. My focus shifts just long enough for Michael to leap forward, quick as a snake, and knock me sideways. My boots lose their grip on the slippery deck and I’m falling, the gun flying out of my hand; and by the time I right myself it’s in Michael’s hand and he has it pointed straight at me.
He doesn’t even hesitate before pulling the trigger.
The snow falls in wild spirals, tossed by the currents of the storm. The lake laps greedily at the hull of the boat. The gun goes click.
Nothing happens. But of course it doesn’t—it isn’t loaded. Why take chances when it didn’t need to be? We were never actually going to kill him.
Michael looks down at the gun in his hand, a stupid expression on his face. He pulls the trigger again—click—and then once more, panic creasing his face.
On the third click, Vanessa slams him in the side of the head with the lifeboat oar.
“Go fuck yourself!” she screams. When he falls, stunned, to the deck, she hits him again, and there’s a sickening crunch that can only be the sound of a cracking skull. She’s still screaming and hitting him—“fuck yourself go fuck yourself”—when I wrestle the oar from her hand and wrap my arms around her chest to stop her from screaming. She shakes in my arms, fighting to break free. She’s soaking wet, and for a moment I think that this is from the melting snow until I realize that no, she’s sweating.
Blood is pooling along the fiberglass under Michael’s head, staining the snow underneath him pink. We stand there for what feels like forever, as Vanessa’s breath slows; she stops quivering, and stills, and I finally release her. She walks over to Michael and looks down at him. His pale blue eyes stare sightlessly back up at her.
“Well,” she says softly. “That’s it, then.”
I run to the side of the boat, and vomit.
* * *
—
Vanessa is the one who takes care of the rest, with a crisp efficiency that shocks me. How does she know how to do all this? The bathrobe that she retrieves from the bedroom closet and ties around Michael’s stiffening body; the heavy boat manuals that she tucks in the robe’s voluminous pockets; the way she knows to push his body off the side, rather than the back, of the deck. “We don’t want him getting stuck in the motor,” she explains flatly.
At first, Michael’s body floats, the white silk bathrobe wrapped around him like a mummy’s shroud. Snow gathers on his back, which still bobs above the surface of the lake. But then it’s not even a minute before his clothes grow sodden with lake water; and then—just like that—he slips under and is gone.
I sit shivering on the side of the boat, numb to the snow that is melting on my face, and watch him sink.
Vanessa mops up the blood with a rag and Windex from the utility closet—it wipes so easily off the fiberglass, no worse than a spilled cocktail—and then tosses it in the water after him, along with the bloody oar and all Michael’s forged documents. Then she wordlessly starts the engine and slowly turns the boat around, and we start motoring back through the storm.
As we drive away, I look back out at the water once more and think I see something slick and dark floating out there in the infinite blue. A log, maybe. A mysterious creature, risen up from the depths of the lake. A drowned man.
And then it’s gone.
I look away, and back toward the shore, and wait to see the lights of Stonehaven.
Epilogue
Fifteen Months Later
SPRING ARRIVES EARLY AT Stonehaven. We throw the windows open on the first day that the temperature tops sixty, let fresh air into Stonehaven’s rooms, chase out the must of another winter. The last crusts of ice are still melting in the shade under the trees, but